I mean, what's it for? It must have been invented by god very late on the Saturday because it's bloody useless. What's it good for, eh? It's useless as a nettle sting appeaser, it tastes like pondweed and it invades your veggie patch from the very moment you think you've finished it.

There's no excuses, so don't try (one statement in favour of the bloody dock means that you're an alien spy). Even the obvious - graft a cabbage onto a dock root, which should be easy and would guarantee cabbages for life with zero club root - apparently won't work. Useless - bloody completely useless.

You could also say the same about ragwort, probably invented on that same Saturday afternoon.
At least with dock the seeds only spread a few yards but ragwort gets blown in from the next county, and is poisonous to boot (and other items of footwear as well, not to mention bovine type animals)
It is relatively pretty in flower though.

We have something that has now been called the dock garden, they seem to have flourished in a bit of ground where the piggy thinks it is funny to dig up all the grass, they are a bugger there all right. In the veg garden, they are no problem at all, in my well mulched raised beds, you can pull the whole thing out root intact, chuck it over the fence where the alpaca's think they are manna from the goddess

According to my maths and those videos, it takes over 10 minutes to get a tiny fingerful of edible dock into an edible state - and even then, there's a warning on the site that it's an acquired taste. I pass.

It would take me back to my childhood if my memory wasn't so bad.
Home made blancmange made with freshly milked full cream Jersey milk with a laurel leaf infused.
Lovely and almondy, if slightly poisonous.